Double-strength cloud to give Aussie researchers a boost

Trevor Clarke

Australian researchers will receive a much-needed boost when the free cloud computing resources they use to investigate climate change adaptation, tectonic plate movements and high-energy particle physics, among other things, double in size this month.

The NeCTAR (National eResearch Collaboration Tools and Resources) research cloud hosted at the University of Melbourne since February will switch on a cluster of new servers at a second site in Melbourne this month, effectively doubling the cloud's processing capacity to 4000 cores (central processing units or CPUs).

Microsoft's cloud principal program manager said 90 per cent of the cloud discussions now covered potential security breaches and service outages.

Within months, other NeCTAR Research Cloud nodes will come online around the country and be "federated" with Melbourne to build the national cloud infrastructure, said the university's head of research services in information and technology services, Steven Manos.

The other locations set to join the cloud by early 2013 are the Australian National University in Canberra, the Queensland Cyber Infrastructure Foundation and Monash University in Melbourne.

Further possible locations (nodes) include Intersect in NSW, iVEC in Western Australia, eResearch South Australia and the University of Tasmania under NeCTAR Stage 2.

The expansion of the cloud's processing capacity and geographic coverage will allow more researchers and institutions to access supercomputing power to conduct calculations and queries on large data sets for free, instead of having to purchase and maintain their own IT infrastructure.

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There are already 1380 users from 43 educational and research institutions on the NeCTAR cloud, including the CSIRO, working on 70 different projects ranging from big data initiatives to smaller research efforts. The number of users has almost tripled since NeCTAR was first announced earlier this year.

“Many research domains deal with big data, whether it be biologists dealing with the reams of data generated by modern gene sequencers, or astronomers dealing with digitised maps of the southern hemisphere sky, or social scientists trying to analyse social media activity related to a cultural event,” Manos said. “For these communities, there are advantages to running a non-commercial research cloud hosted in Australia.”

The infrastructure is part of the federal government's Super Science initiative and received $13.5 million through the Education Investment fund. The organisations hosting cloud nodes are matching this investment, with NeCTAR providing $1.5 million to establish the first node in Melbourne.

The nation-wide cloud is expected to reach 30,000 cores, making it one of the biggest academic resources in Australia, but smaller than installations such as the Fujitsu Primergy supercomputer, being installed at the National Computational Infrastructure facility in Canberra. It is expected to have 57,472 cores.

The Australian Academic and Research Network (AARNet) will be used to connect the nodes around the country at 10Gb speeds. In the next few years, this will be upgraded to 100Gbps — dwarfing the upper limit of the national broadband network's (NBN) possible 1Gbps.

Researchers are also expecting a boost from the petabytes of storage being rolled out through the sister RDSI (Research Data Storage Infrastructure) project.

“Accessing petabytes of big data at high bandwidth would become very costly with commercial cloud services, but becomes feasible when the Australian research community owns and operates the entire infrastructure.”

The sister RDSI project will have an expected storage capacity of more than 100 petabytes nationally with tenders set to commence over the next few months. The project is also part of the government's Super Science initiative and is receiving $50 million in funding.

The NeCTAR capacity upgrade comes at the same time as commercial cloud computing vendors, such as IBM, Fujitsu, HP, Rackspace and Amazon, ramp up their Australian-hosted services.

“We know that researchers are already using commercial cloud services to support their work, and we'd like to continue to support that where it makes sense,” Manos said.

NeCTAR was one of the first major users in Australia of OpenStack for its underlying cloud technology, which is compatible with some commercial cloud service providers.

This means researchers can potentially build applications that can easily be transferred onto those commercial services when they run out of space in their NeCTAR allocations.